Life of Johnson Volume III Part 76

[1152]

'Yes I am proud: I must be proud to see Men not afraid of G.o.d, afraid of me: Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne, Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.

O sacred weapon! left for truth's defence, Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence!'

Pope. _Satires, Epilogue_, ii. 208.

[1153] Page 173. BOSWELL.

[1154] At eleven o'clock that night Johnson recorded:--'I am now to review the last year, and find little but dismal vacuity, neither business nor pleasure; much intended and little done. My health is much broken, my nights afford me little rest.... Last week I published the _Lives of the Poets_, written, I hope, in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety. In this last year I have made little acquisition. I have scarcely read anything. I maintain Mrs. ---- [Desmoulins] and her daughter. Other good of myself I know not where to find, except a little charity.' _Ib_. p. 175.

[1155] Mauritius Lowe, the painter. _Ante_, p. 324.

[1156] See _ante_ ii 249.

[1157] 'Cry to it, nuncle, as the c.o.c.kney did to the eels when she put 'em i' the paste alive; she knapped 'em o' the c.o.xcombs with a stick, and cried, "Down wantons, down!"' _King Lear_, act ii. sc. 4.

[1158] See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Sept. 23, where Johnson, speaking of claret, said that 'there were people who died of dropsies, which they contracted in trying to get drunk.'

[1159] 'If,' wrote Johnson in one of his _Debates_ (_Works_ xi. 392), 'the felicity of drunkenness can be more cheaply obtained by buying spirits than ale, it is easy to see which will be preferred.' See _post_, March 30, 1781.

[1160] Dempster, to whom Boswell complained that his nerves were affected, replied:--'One had better be palsied at eighteen than not keep company with such a man.' _Ante_, i. 434.

[1161] Marquis of Graham, afterwards third Duke of Montrose. In _The Rolliad_ (ed. 1795) he is thus attacked:--

'Superior to abuse He n.o.bly glories in the name of Goose; Such Geese at Rome from the perfidious Gaul Preserved the Treas'ry-Bench and Capitol.'

He was one of the Lords of the Treasury. See also _The Rolliad_, p. 60

[1162] Johnson, however, when telling Mrs. Thrale that, in case of her husband's death, she ought to carry on his business, said:--'Do not be frighted; trade could not be managed by those who manage it if it had much difficulty. Their great books are soon understood, and their language,

"If speech it may be called, that speech is none Distinguishable in number, mood, or tense,"

is understood with no very laborious application.' _Piozzi Letters_, ii.

91. See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Oct. 18.

[1163] See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Sept. 26.

[1164] See _ante_, iii. 88, note 1.

[1165] The Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, with whom she lived seventeen years, and by whom she had nine children. _Ann. Reg_.

xxii. 206. The Duke of Richmond attacked her in the House of Lords as one 'who was supposed to sell favours in the Admiralty for money.'

Walpole's _Journal of the Reign of George III_, ii. 248, and _Parl.

Hist_. xix. 993. It so happened that on the day on which Hackman was hanged 'Fox moved for the removal of Lord Sandwich [from office] but was beaten by a large majority.' Walpole's _Letters_, vii. 194. One of her children was Basil Montague, the editor of _Bacon_. Carlyle writes of him:--'On going to Hinchinbrook, I found he was strikingly like the dissolute, questionable Earl of Sandwich; who, indeed, had been father of him in a highly tragic way.' Carlyle's _Reminiscences_, i. 224.

Hackman, who was a clergyman of the Church, had once been in the army.

Cradock's _Memoirs_, i. 140.

[1166] On the following Monday Boswell was present at Hackman's execution, riding to Tyburn with him in a mourning coach. _London Mag_.

for 1779, p. 189.

[1167] At the Club. CROKER. See _ante_, ii. 345, note 5.

[1168] See _ante_, p. 281, for a previous slight altercation, and p. 195 for a possible cause of unfriendly feeling between the two men. If such a feeling existed, it pa.s.sed away, at all events on Johnson's side, before Beauclerk's death. See _post_, iv. 10.

[1169] This gentleman who loved b.u.t.tered m.u.f.fins reappears in _Pickwick_ (ch. 44), as 'the man who killed himself on principle,' after eating three-s.h.i.+llings' worth of crumpets. Mr. Croker says that Mr. Fitzherbert is meant; but he hanged himself. _Ante_, ii. 228, note 3.

[1170] 'It is not impossible that this restless desire of novelty, which gives so much trouble to the teacher, may be often the struggle of the understanding starting from that to which it is not by nature adapted, and travelling in search of something on which it may fix with greater satisfaction. For, without supposing each man particularly marked out by his genius for particular performances, it may be easily conceived that when a numerous cla.s.s of boys is confined indiscriminately to the same forms of composition, the repet.i.tion of the same words, or the explication of the same sentiments, the employment must, either by nature or accident, be less suitable to some than others.... Weariness looks out for relief, and leisure for employment, and surely it is rational to indulge the wanderings of both.' Johnson's _Works_, v. 232.

See _post_, iv. 21.

[1171] 'See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Sept 10, and Johnson's _Works_, viii. 466. Mallet had the impudence to write to Hume that the book was ready for the press; 'which,' adds Hume, 'is more than I or most people expected.' J.H. Burton's _Hume_, ii. 139.

[1172] The name is not given in the first two editions. See _ante_, i. 82.

[1173] See p. 289 of this vol., and vol. i. p. 207. BOSWELL. The saying is from Diogenes Laertius, bk. v. ch. I, and is attributed to Aristotle --[Greek: _ho philoi oudeis philos_.]

[1174]

'Love, the most generous pa.s.sion of the mind, The softest refuge innocence can find; The safe director of unguided youth, Fraught with kind wishes, and secured by truth; That cordial drop Heaven in our cup has thrown, To make the nauseous draught of life go down.'

Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, _A Letter from Artemisia_, Chalmers's _Poets_, viii. 242. Pope (_Imitations of Horace_, _Epist_. I. vi. 126) refers to these lines:--

'If, after all, we must with Wilmot own, The cordial drop of life is love alone.'

[1175] Garrick wrote in 1776:--'Gout, stone, and sore throat! Yet I am in spirits.' _Garrick Corres_, ii. 138.

[1176] See ante, p. 70.

[1177] In _The Life of Edmund Smith_ (_Works_, vii. 380). See _ante_, i. 81.

[1178] Johnson wrote of Foote's death:--'The world is really impoverished by his sinking glories.' Piozzi _Letters_, i. 396. See _ante_, p. 185, note 1.

[1179] 'Allowance must be made for some degree of exaggerated praise,'

he said in speaking of epitaphs. 'In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.' _Ante_, ii. 407.

[1180] Garrick retired in January 1776, three years before his death.

He visited Ireland in 1742, and again in 1743. Davies's _Garrick_, i. 57, 91.

[1181] In the original _impoverished_.

[1182] Certainly not Horace Walpole, as had been suggested to Mr.

Croker. He and Johnson can scarcely be said to have known each other (_post_, under June 19, 1784, note). A sentence in one of Walpole's _Letters_ (iv. 407) shews that he was very unlike the French wit. On Sept. 22, 1765, he wrote from Paris:--'The French affect philosophy, literature, and free-thinking: the first never did, and never will possess me; of the two others I have long been tired. _Free-thinking is for one's self, surely not for society_.' Perhaps Richard Fitzpatrick is meant, who later on joined in writing _The Rolliad_, and who was the cousin and 'sworn brother' of Charles Fox. Walpole describes him as 'an agreeable young man of parts,' and mentions his 'genteel irony and badinage.' _Journal of the Reign of George III_, i. 167 and ii. 560. He was Lord Shelburne's brother-in-law, at whose house Johnson might have met him, as well as in Fox's company. There are one or two lines in _The Rolliad_ which border on profanity. Rogers (_Table-Talk_, p. 104) said that 'Fitzpatrick was at one time nearly as famous for his wit as Hare.'

Tickell in his _Epistle from the Hon. Charles Fox to the Hon. John Townshend_, p. 13, writes:--

'Oft shall Fitzpatrick's wit and Stanhope's ease, And Burgoyne's manly sense unite to please.'

[1183] See ante, i. 379, note 2.

[1184] According to Mr. Wright (Croker's _Boswell_, p. 630), this physician was Dr. James. I have examined, however, the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th editions of his _Dissertation on Fevers_, but can find no mention of this. In the 7th edition, published in 1770, he complains (p.

111) of 'the virulence and rancour with which the fever-powder and its inventor have been traduced and persecuted by the vendors of medicines and their abettors.'